**WARNING: **Do not proceed further if you are trying to save money.
That said, I’m looking to put together a small home networking setup. Every time I search about a related topic I get lost in a rabbit hole and am completely paralysed with options. So started this thread to learn about having your own homelab esp. in our local context and not go bankrupt.
I’ve seen veterans here posting on different related topics. So as a beginning, please post your homelab setups (in detail), what hardware you run, what services you self-host/run, where all do you procure parts, do you make money with it or benefit professionally or is it just a hobby, when did you get into this etc
I bought a used Dell Optiplex 3060 SFF PC with Core i3, 16 GB ram and 512 GB SSD storage. I am running several docker containers on it with Debian 12 as host. It costed my around 14k.
As your 1st foray into self hosting, you can try this.
The best option to get started is to get 8th or 9th gen intel cpu tiny machines from Dell, HP or Lenovo(all refurbished)
These can support 32Gb or 64GB RAM, nvme and Sata SSD, Lenovo also support PCie expansion.
These are the best and you can get 2-3 machines in 30-40k which would be sufficient to start setup with proxmox cluster or Linux VMs
I have a r5 3600 and a x570 board (8 sata ports) with 8gb*4 3200cl16 ram.
Case, I used a second hand corsair 550d obsidian for a while and after I had more than 3 hdds, got the silverstone cs380
I use Unraid because being able to add more drives down the line while having some form of disk fail protection was important to me.
I have it for work and hobby. I save all my client files, drawings and images on the server and use tailscale to access it at sites on the phone or ipad.
i use immich and pi hole as docker.
Mostly used space invader one’s guides on youtube.
It all didn’t make much sense while researching, but once you jump in, it sort of starts fitting together in your head.
Nice thread.. something that I am interested in as well..
I am using my old laptop i5 8th gen processor as a homeserver plugged in with SSD to boot up and main storage of 16tb HDD via usb external HDD.
My main purpose pi hole, 24x7 seeding and media server.
wow that is a neat setup and pretty good documentation. I read it and understood a lot of things
What do you think about using ECC RAM on old supported asrock AM4 mobo and ryzen 5600? is ECC RAM that beneficial if it’s just personal data (mostly old files/photos that are not frequently accessed) and some VMs
I have a more than a decade old (my then desktop pc case) Lian Li PC-9F aluminium case lying around. I will be using that.
Here is my homepage dashboard and some services that I run. I am moving house so I guess I’ll update the full setup when I am done.
Lost of my stuff were bought from this forum
I deliberately avoid exposing these services to the wider internet, as I don’t want to deal with the complexities of securing this setup for public access.
I use [Tailscale](’
) to create a VPN for these services along with all my personal devices so I can access them from everywhere without needing a static IP setup.
Thanks! This has come from a long process of collecting information from various sources (YouTube, Reddit, TrueNAS/Unraid forums etc).
ECC is always good to have if you can get it, if you value data integrity highly. If you have separate backups for this data elsewhere, you can do without it as the chance of corruption is pretty small.
Yesterday, I thought of converting my desktop machine to run Proxmox and virualize my windows and linux machines.
The question is, I want to store data on 1 SSD, fomatted as exfat. So that I can remove it anytime I want and use it with different machine anytime.
Is there anyway to achieve this in proxmox?
I want to do this beacuse i don’t want to play with my data right now. Once I get more familiar with proxmox, I will see what can be done.
Also, what is the preferred way to install proxmox these days? If I remember correctly, earlier used to be installed on a USB.
Currently, I am running:
Pihole on a Pi zero W.( running continously since 2019)
Unless you port forward on your router, your server(s) will be behind the NAT and thus not exposed to the public internet unless you specifically want to expose them.
I’ll second this. I had a few things manually exposed through router (Tomato / DDWRT is handy for this stuff), and everything else happily behind the NAT.. no issues for multiple years of running it 24x7
Yes, agreed. What I meant above is that I have no special use case of a static IP with my setup, as with Tailscale I can connect to my servers from anywhere.
Additionally I run one ingress on port :443, which handles all services in hosted here, routed via different subdomains. So its pretty much exposing all or nothing in that case, unless I start doing some extra filtering based on origin subnet etc, which is the complexity I want to avoid (along with things like setting up portforward etc). Some of these services don’t even have auth (!), or can have CVEs that I don’t patch very religiously so keeping everything non-accessible makes most sense to me.
Yeah, I have done a similar setup in the past for some game servers I ran in this setup temporarily. But for most things I just keep it simple by keeping it within my VPN.
Ordered their 4U and 1U cases, as well as 24U floor rack
1U was in good condition, 4U was a bit dented and bent on one end and 24U arrived perfectly fine as well.
Oh, I also ordered their tray thingy and the PDU, both of them work fine too. No problems there.
For my next build, I’m considering downsizing to a 10inch rack. Kinda cute and would be very cool if I also get access to a 3D Printer. A truly “mini” home lab haha
Haven’t looked at how it’ll be shipped to India, or if it’s available in Robu or other electronics store yet. Hopefully it is
